For the most part, I am happy with my life to date.  I am and have been largely content with my longtime corporate gig, That Which Pays the Bills; I have had a nice run at my company and while it is not the most exciting or lucrative career path, it’s been stable.  Stability is a nice thing to have in a recession that doesn’t end and just changes its name to “recovery.”  In my personal life I’ve also achieved a number of milestones and enjoyed many experiences that my younger self found terribly ambitious and scandalous when she was writing that essay in tenth grade.

But I am not, it would seem, an adventurer by nature. I take calculated gambles that sometimes seem crazy to even more wary folks, but for the most part I prefer to play it safe.  Sometimes, far too safe.  And this is something about myself which I loathe perhaps the most of all.  Even more than my intractable cellulite.

This week I was reading a story in a weekly city rag about an old acquaintance of the Russian lover’s; she has gone on to make a infamous name for herself doing infamous things that may one day limit her career options in politics or early childhood education, but she has found success and happiness and lives with authenticity.  She’s beautiful, intelligent, and well-spoken.  She does not play it safe.

Reading about her – her life and her approach to life – I couldn’t help but feel envy.  I am sometimes mildly jealous of other people for having things I don’t have, or for not having to deal with things I do, but full-blown envy only happens when I encounter someone who seems to have figured out how to live their life better than I could ever hope to live my own.  I feel especially gutted by those women who seem to have not just all the things, but more importantly be all the things, that somehow I just can’t.

I think at its worst, envy is not actually about wanting to be someone else; it’s about wanting to find a way to be yourself as well as someone else has found to be their self.  At the core, I think very few people actually suffer from genuine or total self-loathing; in fact, although we’re culturally conditioned to be publicly self-abasing, most people believe themselves to be pretty fucking great. Low self-esteem is not what plagues us; if anything, we have too much esteem.  What we don’t have is the ability to translate that esteem into lives fully lived.  We hold back.  Most of us do, anyway.

The Russian lover does not hold back.  In classic relationship motif, this was something about him that attracted me at first and then began to annoy me as the years went by; in my eyes, his most endearing quality became his fatal flaw.  I contemplated the future of the relationship.

And then I asked myself why this thing about him that I used to love was bothering me so much, and I came to the conclusion that it was because I felt so separated from his unfiltered, unafraid engagement with the world.  In those moments where he boldly had a confrontation or took action toward the future, I felt timid and lost beside him.

And I reached the realization that at least one person in a relationship must have if two people are going to stay together: I decided the problem was with me. I was the one convinced that he should try to be a tamed version of himself while fighting my own demons of repression.  Where I was not succeeding I determined he should, a little bit, fail.

That is the most toxic dynamic that can be introduced in a relationship.

I snapped out of it because, in the end, I wanted to be with the Russian lover.  And I wanted the Russian lover to be the Russian lover.  Finally, I understood that I was trying to censor him because I was afraid to be the uncensored version of myself.  Playing it safe was becoming who I was, not just something I preferred to do.  And it damn near destroyed not just my relationship, but both of the people in it.

So, envy. Stumbling across the paper last week made it obvious that I haven’t quite reached a place where I am convinced my choices are entirely based on knowing myself and my desires and not based on fear and avoidance.  Because what I envy about that other girl isn’t her looks (and yes, she’s prettier), her success (and yes, she’s richer), or her fame (and yes, you’ve heard of her).  I envy the pure sense of freedom she has about herself.

I think if I can find that, the rest will take care of itself.